개별 경험의 역사성: 『마지막 여정』의 평범한 서사가 드러내는 보편정서

Abstract

Graham Swift has constantly questioned the link between public history and individual experiences throughout his works. He struggles with the ideas of narrative, history, conflicts between the generations, and the place of an individual in the larger scale of events, simultaneously interweaving them by his circular narrative technique. This paper explores Swift's sixth novel Last Orders which won the Booker Prize for Fiction. The novel depicts a journey to Margate begun in a pub in South London Bermondsey by four men. They are intent on fulfilling the dying wish of their recently deceased friend Jack Dodds who asked to have his ashes "chucked off the end of Margate pier" into the sea. Three of the men, except Jack's adopted son Vince, are in their late sixties, all of whom are working class. The novel poignantly portrays a fading generation bonded and shaped by World War Ⅱ. The journey is presented in multiple voices of first person narratives with the tumbling Cockney used by characters, shifting between times and tenses with a rejection of the chronologically linear view. The memories of Jack are woven into the irritations of their immediate situation, as they clash with each other and reflect upon themselves separately. They take detours which remind them of their memories including Rochester, Wick's Farm, Chatham and Canterbury, and their inner conflicts are dissolved along the journey. Swift creates a sense of uneasiness and colours it with grim humour. The extraordinary in the ordinary becomes the universal through Swift's fluency of language. In ordinary men's voices Swift considers not only some of the serious issues of life but also everyday human relations. The Englishness, which is one of his inspirations, extends into the humanness. Last Orders phrases a question about present England which seems to be hovering on the edge of the undefined between the glorified past and the uncertain future. Thus he makes the reader contemplate the overall direction of life: where do we go to? Swift's answer remains ambivalent, yet he puts the journey on the way between past and future/life and death. And then he shows us that individual stories become history through the power of imagination.